I had a chat recently with Brad Semp, the CEO of CashMap.com. He's a systems engineer who has created a great way of creating systems for marketers. Imagine having documentation so that your process flow is effective. It also seems to me that a lot of the information that he shared with me indicates he's way ahead of the game and anyone who finds themselves in a mess really ought to contact him. My opinion about new business online is similar to his. Except, I've followed a fairly intuitive, work-as-you-go approach. The reason for this is that documentation, while good, tends to slow down someone like me. Some of us tend to make decisions very rapidly, and I fall under what the TAIS profiling tool (which is used to profile people across different attentional styles) calls a high-speed decision maker.
Some of us may not have this, but I can say that it takes time to develop. In such a case, you will need a consultant who can draw up a proper business system for you, and you build your own habitual patterns of business and just work on the process.
However, there is a case for enhancing your systems that you might not have come across yet - familiarity. This is not just going to be useful for productivity's sake. I mean, you can get all your people doing the work you need, but if it is too haphazard and there's no documentation, you will end up wasting a lot of time and effort reinventing the wheel all the time.
Conversely, being familiar with a system could also cost you in terms of inflexibility. There's always a delicate balance between what you do and what you change.
My opinion is that we ought to favor flexible systems. That's paradoxical in and of itself, but in the world of systems, we know this to be a cybernetic element. Cybernetc organisms have feedback loops. Human beings have a cybernetic loop that enables us to make decisions and judge things.
When you are in such a situation, what your client can see is a very smooth operation, thereby making it comfortable for them to work with you or purchase stuff from you. After all, you are predictable, and everyone likes predictable behavior.
On the back end, you might be fighting fire, making snap decisions and having to change processes. This is not transparent to the customer. At the end of the day, you carry the load by refining systems in the back office. Documenting your systems and processes in a step-by-step flow will help you assess decision points and create a better reference point for anything that you might want to change, adapt, modify or remove later in your business life.
Marketing is an entire system that requires the manager to be perceptive to the dynamic flow - the cybernetic flow - within the environment. There are internal systems like strategy, finance and advertising that are linked to marketing. There are primary and secondary stakeholders, each receiving a different level of impact from the other. How do we react to this determines the ability for us to control our own marketing results, that affect the other internal systems and therefore the profitability of the organization.
